The composed murderer bares all teeth in a smile and invites you for a drink in their dark corner of the mess hall. What do you do?

Blood & Salt is a lightweight role-playing game intended for 1-shot or few-session games with minimal preparation. The game follows dark steampunk themes of a Victorian Era, but is set in a bizarre world where unexpected things can happen at any moment—most of them bad. It builds on horror tropes but focuses on action-oriented play rather than investigation. The game is played with a Game Master and several players, and requires only the printed sheets, pens and a few six-sided dice. While the game is very rules-light, it is more suitable for Game Masters with some RPG experience due to the ambiguity and themes of the setting.

Inspired by the Sunless Sea computer game (Failbetter Games, 2015), Blood & Salt is an adaptation of the Lasers & Feelings RPG by John Harper. It is created by Antonios Liapis (2022) but feel free to take any part of it and expand, rewrite, adapt as you see fit—as long as it's for a noncommercial application and the author is attributed.